Billionaire philanthropist Robert F. Smith recently announced the launch of the Student Freedom Initiative, a program designed to provide paid internships to HBCU students. Robert F. Smith will launch the Student Freedom Initiative’s HELPS Program in partnership with financial regulation company Prudential Finance. The partnership will address Black students’ disproportionate financial loan burden, which often hinders their career progression. The program aims to provide science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) HBCU students with $1.8 million in microgrants, which will act as a contingent fund alongside their traditional college loans. Robert F. Smith, famously known
“I got my job through Twitter 🎉” I never thought that I’d be the one saying those words. I’ve always seen posts of people from tech Twitter who have shared that they got a job on Twitter or that online presence helped them secure a job. Little did I know that I would be a witness to this too. Welcome to all, and thank you for taking your time to read about my journey of how I got into tech, the challenges I’ve faced, the resources I’ve used, how I
Financial giant, Mastercard, has officially announced the class of this year’s Start Path program, an award-winning engagement program aimed at providing global support and mentorship to the brightest late-stage startups. According to a press release, Mastercard selected three early-stage startups led by underrepresented founders and four late-stage fintech innovators looking to scale their businesses for this year’s program. “As we continue our eight-year legacy of successful collaboration with startups around the world through Start Path,” said Blake Rosenthal, executive vice president, Fintech & Segment Solutions at Mastercard. “The companies we selected are on
There is an ever-growing list of schemes and networks which support diverse and underrepresented founders in Europe’s tech ecosystem. From Czechitas, a non-profit aiming to increase diversity in the tech sector through education and workshop initiatives, to Diverse and Equal — UK, a two-day conference on diversity and inclusion held in Manchester – there’s an increase in communities working on upskilling those from diverse backgrounds, empowering migrants and refugees, and engaging young people in tech. Here’s a list of other initiatives Diversidays — France This organization promotes social, cultural, and
Ingressive Capital, a $10 million venture capital fund launched by Maya Horgan Famodu with its headquarters in Nigeria, celebrated a five-year-mark last week. Horgan Famodu launched Ingressive when she was just 25. Today, at the age of 31, her fund is focused on leveling the playing field for female entrepreneurs: about 40% of its portfolio companies are founded or co-founded by women. In 2020, Ingressive doubled its fund to $10 million, with backers that include Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund, Michael Seibel of Y Combinator, Techstars, and others. The fund that invests
“Try not to use the word minority, say underprivileged or underserved; otherwise, if you say minority, investors will make certain assumptions.” “What assumptions?” “Oh, you know…” That was an interaction between a first-time Black founder and a white venture capital (VC) investor who was supposed to be advising her. Speaking to POCIT, she said she felt several investors she had spoken to had an unconscious bias towards her as a founder and the audience she was targeting. While she understood POC markets were ‘small’ in her native country – on
Black-owned tech startup, Readyhubb, has launched a new website booking service to empower appointment-based professionals across the U.S. Readyhubb, founded in 2022 by Chidi Ashley, is a booking platform that caters to many industries. The app streamlines all aspects of the booking process by designing a system that minimizes the number of daily tools professionals need to manage. Businesses that have a presence on social media and may not have a proper booking and client management system will benefit hugely from this platform. Not only does it provide an easily
A new study has found racial and gender bias in the job performance feedback given to business employees. Textio, an augmented writing platform, surveyed over 25,000 business employees and also analyzed actual performance feedback documents, and noted consistent patterns of inequity by gender, race, and age. Latinx and Black employees were more likely to receive job performance feedback that was negatively biased and not actionable. What did they find? According to the findings, Asian people get more feedback than people of any other race—25% more than white people—and Black men
Some of you might have heard about Antler, an early-stage VC firm that invests in some of the most “exceptional” (their words, not mine) founders worldwide. Well, the firm founded by Mark Zuckerburg’s classmate Magnus Grimeland, has a 3-month accelerator program each year. Did Mark and Magnus work together? Not exactly. Magnus might have worked for Mark at TheFacebook, as it was then known, if he weren’t also juggling classes and athletics and caring for his infant son, according to Forbes. Antler, launched in 2017 in Singapore, is striving to combine
This week, the world saw the “deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe” ever taken by the U.S. Space Agency, NASA. The milestone project was led by Gregory Robinson, a Black scientist at the agency. At NASA, Robinson, 62, is a rarity: a Black man among the agency’s top managers. Robinson was comfortable at another job working as an Associate Deputy Administrator for Programs at NASA when he was asked to take over a stalled NASA project in 2018 after billions of dollars were sunk into the program without yielding
